Can ChatGPT Replace Developers?
No, ChatGPT does not replace a real living programmer today. Developers are safe for now.
If that is the answer you were looking for, job done!
Can ChatGPT replace coding? (Where ChatGPT is a placeholder for all the many brands of LLM tool out there today). Hmmm … maybe? Kind of?
How many site owners, though, are going to nuke their own website (or bank account) before they realize?
What is the problem?
So will ChatGPT replace programmers as the marketing suggests? Well, in my view, telling a computer what you want it to do in precise enough terms that the output matches your intent is programming.
That said, I think the spirit of the question is does ChatGPT replace web developers or coders by allowing you to use natural language instead of a programming language to express yourself.
We are getting closer to that, but we are not fully there yet.
I keep seeing people selling guides and courses about how you can use ChatGPT to enhance your website functionality without any programming knowledge.
Here on the right is just one example (click the image to embiggen).
My reaction is always to think how many times I have seen actual developers introduce vulnerabilities and code conflicts by mistake, how easy would it be for one of these course students to wreck their site?
Maybe not today, or next week, but months after they activate their shiny new plugin?
Putting Theory to Test
Today I tested my theory out.
I hand-coded a WordPress plugin in regular PHP with no additional libraries by following the developer integration documentation at LifterLMS and Aweber.
The plugin signs up a newly registered free member resources user for my free newsletter. Straightforward stuff.
When I had a working proof of concept, I asked ChatGPT to create a similar thing for me.
To be honest the result was impressive … but still WRONG, and worse, insecure.
And the process was slow. I had to keep refreshing and use the “Continue Generating” button a lot, as well as give the tool a lot of guideance about what it should include, and essential changes it needed to make.
So it wasn’t particularly quick, and it was producing broken code.
When it was wrong, it was not always wrong in an obvious, easy to correct way.
No QA process would understand the entirety of what wasn’t working, so it would have needed detailed debugging.
Even as a developer, I couldn’t just look at the code that was generated and say “here is the problem” unless I had already immersed myself in the docs.
What is it Good? Cursor/Co-Pilot/ChatGPT for Developers
Don’t get me wrong, as I say, it was impressive, but mostly for boilerplate or code snippets that you would find in the official docs or Stackoverflow. That’s not surprising as these things were trained on those sources and are really autocorrect on steroids.
In fact, I think a lot of the actual working code that I was given was cribbed from a Github repo or forum, but that is where the issues of security and being incorrect also crept in.
My advice is to keep using ChatGPT etc, they are useful tools, but trust it about as much as a brand new intern coder.
Have someone with domain experience check, validate, QA, and put it into staging.
In fact, ask your tool to make detailed notes about the work done and to create automated tests to validate that your code does what it is meant to, without introducing security vulnerabilities.
